Moving/migrating between different pods

Hi all,
First of all apologies for jumping the gun a bit as I do not know whether the Diaspora Community would be the correct form/place to have this discussion in or the Feature proposal or some other place.

I used this as I thought that the feature I am asking about should be a #core feature of the network. I have no idea whether the following is even possible or not so letting my distinguished friends (developers and other knowledgeable people ) respond to my queries below :-

One of the biggest reasons for people to migrate from any social network to any other is the cost of moving contacts, friends, posts etc. and this is both a tremendous time and effort cost.

Now while from third-party social sites it is and will be difficult because you also need your friends to shift, it seems the same issue is even if you change pods.

See https://diasp.eu/posts/2827036 for details.

Now I did a similar migration years ago from blogspot.com to wordpress.com. The good point was that all my posts came onto wordpress without an issue. I did have to fiddle with the formatting a bit afters but was easily manageable.

Now in this instance I’m just starting from poddery.com to diasp.eu which mean the following things need to be exported and imported.

a. Me and my profile - As of now there is no way that I know to automatically do the same so hence signed up and filled in manually. It would be nice if there was some way in the interface to just point to my old credentials and it would take from there.

The technology for doing this sort of thing is there AFAIK.

b. getting all the contacts in the new pod as well - Again the technology for this already exists. When all social-networking sites can look through my e-mail address book and tell me who’s online, this is just a different pod. So if I give access it should be able to get those contacts.

Even if I were to try to do manually just do that, there doesn’t seem to be a place from where I can know list of all my contacts within the social network. I have to use both the private conversations as well as whoever is active on the stream to arrive at who’s there and even then I’m liable to miss a contact or two.

For e.g. somebody who is not active in posting but is there on poddery (there may be few or many who fill that slot including me.)

c. Public and semi-shared posts :- This one is a bit tricky but don’t think it should be that hard as this is already known. The new pod should just respect whatever Aspects the old pod had.

Now I looked as a non-developer and saw that one of the issues could be that both run a slightly different minor different of the code even though they run the same major version.

To be more specific :-

diasp.eu runs at code 0.4.1.2-p1b09919d

while poddery.com runs at code 0.4.1.2-p5cabd692 so there is a difference there.

So can there be a web-tool or something where I am able to export profiles within various pods ?

Looking forward to clarifications on the above. Feel free to take this to any of the sub-forums if they make more sense for the query.


Note: This discussion was imported from Loomio. Click here to view the original discussion.

Gosh, please use the search function. It’s a hard feature to do but was on the planned features list since the inception of diaspora almost five years ago.

https://www.loomio.org/d/w6nfQPFc/personal-data-import-export

@goob thank you for pointing that out. It seems the initial bug was https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/908 .

I also saw https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/5343

Sadly though, all the information seems to be scattered though. I do hope this becomes a reality soon but for now I think I am in a fix as to what to do.

Can somebody advise what should be my way forward, should I be doing manual adding of contacts and what about my old posts, how do I migrate them from poddery.com to diasp.eu ?

You can’t migrate posts from one pod to another. However, you can export them as a download (currently XML, but if you wait until the next release, this will be changed to JSON), and it might become possible to import them to your new pod at a later date.

For now, you’ll need to share with each of the people you want to remain contacts from your new account, asking them to share with you.

It’s not ideal, I know; but, as Jonne says, this is an immensely complex thing to code in a way which is both easy for users and secure, and it’s better not to have any ‘migrate’ feature until a way can be worked out and developed which is both of those.

Closing in favour of the active discussion.